What if?
by Purple Snowstorm
Summary: Songfic to F**kin' Perfect by P!nk. Rated M for profanity and implied rape and sexual abuse. Nina's gran's point of view of Nina's life before boarding school. What if it wasn't as great as Nina makes it seem? What if England was her escape? Now a 2-shot
1. Chapter 1

I looked at myself, age thirty-two, a grandmother... Yes, I made all the wrong choices in life, causing my daughter to follow suit... I had been a sixteen-year-old mother, and now my precious baby was the same. She fled to her boyfriend's apartment when she found that she was pregnant. I didn't stop her. I didn't want to see her turn into me...but I would fix that. About four and a half months into the pregnancy, her boyfriend dumped her, and she used every penny she had ever made in her life to buy a two-room condo to raise her family in. She came running to me multiple times in the pregnancy, and as a result, I had a key to her condo and permission to visit at any time. After all, to buy the condo, she had to get my permission. And I gave it to her. I don't know why...I just didn't want to have to watch her failure.

And that's why, on the night the hospital called and told me that my granddaughter Nina was born, I drove myself down to that condo and set up my daughter's old crib in the corner of the cramped bedroom. The doorman paid me no attention as I left and drove to the hospital.

I walked right up to the receptionist and said, "I'm looking for my daughter. Rachel Martin. She should be in the maternity ward, and she just gave birth to my granddaughter." The woman looked up, startled at my age, and began ruffling through her book. "Room 759," she stated simply.

My finger hit the elevator button and it came immediately. After all, it was about two in the morning. Why did my family have to be cursed with giving birth in the middle of the night? I punched the "7" button and it lit up. The doors promptly closed and I was whisked up to the seventh floor, uninterrupted. On the way up, a song that I had heard in the car was playing... I actually listened to a few lines of it.

_"Pretty pretty please_  
_Don't you ever ever feel_  
_Like you're less than_  
_Less than perfect_  
_Pretty pretty please_  
_If you ever ever feel_  
_Like you're nothing_  
_You are perfect to me."_

Just then, the elevator hit the seventh floor, and I immediately got off, almost running into a student nurse. I read the sign, which pointed one way down the hallway and said, "700-750". I headed the other direction. Within the first ten doors, I hit room "759". The door was unlocked, and I opened it to see a baby, asleep, in Rachel's arms. The baby, Nina, was...adorable. I knew she would grow up to beautiful. As I walked over to the bed, the song I had heard in the elevator and the car came back to me, and I realized exactly how much it applied to me. As Rachel handed me my granddaughter, looking ashamed of herself, I smiled down at the infant and mouthed, "You are perfect to me," to her. The sleeping Nina squirmed slightly in my arms. From that moment on, I vowed to raise her as if she were my daughter.

I was so glad I made that vow, even if I broke it later in life... Within a week of Nina's birth, Rachel had gotten a job, taking the night shift at a local department store. Every night, I would be the one who rocked Nina to sleep, who fed her, who changed her diapers, and who sang to her when she cried.

As soon as Rachel turned eighteen, her new boyfriend proposed to her. I didn't like him. He was a party animal, and usually got drunk at parties, even though he was below legal drinking age. The wedding was rushed, with the now-two year-old Nina sleeping in the front row of the local church only two months later. Then, Rachel started growing distant from me...she and her boyfriend always were out at nights, and I began to wonder if Rachel was even working. Every night, I would stay at their condo. Nina was developing well. She was two, able to walk, and her first word had been "grannie" at nine months old. I smiled at the memory. She was the best granddaughter I could ask for.

She would often wake up in the middle of the night, though. Nightmares, she said. I didn't blame her. I didn't know what her stepfather did to her when he came home, late in the morning, long after Rachel returned and I was shooed away.

I was the one who started taking Nina to the local church for preschool as soon as she turned three. She practically became my daughter, and I was okay with it. Thirty-five was about the age of the other parents at the preschool... One day, on the way home, the song came on again. The song that kept on popping up, from the night of Nina's birth onward. It was one of the songs I sang to her to get her to fall asleep. Well, I only sang the chorus. The rest was too inappropriate for a toddler. Nina perked up in her toddler seat and said, "Gwannie, you sing song?" A smile involuntarily crossed my face. Nina's voice was so adorable...

"Yes, honey. I sing this song to you. Do you know what perfect means?" I asked her, talking slowly so she would understand me.

I saw Nina nod her head. "It means wondewfuwl and amazwing and me!" she explained in her cute little baby voice.

"And don't you ever forget that you're always going to be perfect," I whispered to her.

Suddenly, I saw her head drop and her expression change from excited and triumphant to rather...depressed. "What's wrong, honey?" I asked her.

She gave a sniff. "Daddy...he doesn't thwink I'm pewfect..."

I stiffened up. "Honey, don't listen to Daddy. Never listen to him. Listen to me. Daddy can't think right a lot of the time. If he ever hurts you, tell me."

I heard her sniff again. Poor baby...

The rest of her life...well, at least until she turned about twelve...was a wreck...

When she got to be four and a half, I started getting reports that she was moody and not talking to people, other than her best friend May. And, one day...she wouldn't talk to me. She was almost five. It was the summer before she was to start kindergarten. I asked her what was wrong...and her best friend, May...she had died in a car crash caused by some drunk driver.

The report was publicized that night...and the drunk driver had been Nina's father, Rachel's husband, my son in-law. I was furious. I almost went to file a lawsuit against Nina's parents to switch Nina's custody to me, but decided against it. I had been parenting her so far, and I was going to give her real parents one more chance to get it right.

I made the worst decision of my life the next day. I decided that I really would let her parents try to get it right, and I left her on her own...with them...for a week. About three days in, I got a phone call from Rachel. She was forcing me out of Nina's life for good, because she had just found out about how I had signed Nina up for preschool. She thought that I had just been taking Nina to my house, or out to other places, for the time she was gone every day. That night, I cried and cried. I had lost my baby daughter, the one who I was trying to raise right and the one who I had already screwed up.

Finally, when the night before the first day of school came around (about three weeks later), I sneaked back into Rachel's condo at almost midnight. I wasn't questioned; I never was. Within five minutes, I was in Rachel's condo, heading to the supply closet where Nina's bed was, and had been, since Rachel's husband moved in. I lifted her tiny form from the small bed and cradled her in my arms. She was very heavy, no longer my little baby. That thought brought tears to my eyes. My eyes rested on her face, and I suddenly noticed that her nose was slightly crooked and she had a bruise on her neck...anger boiled up in me. She hadn't gone anywhere over the last few weeks. She had been stuck in the house. The only way she could have gotten hurt was her father, or even her mother. Her eyes blinked open as I sat on the couch, stroking her short light brown hair. The whites of her eyes were red, and I assumed that she had cried herself to sleep. As soon as she registered that it was me on the couch, she sat up and threw her arms around my neck, crying.

"Mama and daddy hurt me," she sobbed into my shoulder. "You told me to tell you if they ever did...and now..." A fresh round of sobs began. I rubbed her back soothingly, though I was brimming with anger myself.

"Ssshhhhh...it's okay, Nina...I'll always be here for you...I'm never going to hurt you...you're going to start school tomorrow...your birthday..." I stopped dead in my tracks while I was talking. "Oh, my gosh, I forgot your birthday...I'm so sorry, Nins...we'll celebrate after school, tomorrow, okay? You're enrolled in extended school services, which means your mom thinks you stay at school late every day. I'll take you out after school tomorrow, okay?"

Nina sniffed and nodded into my chest. I pulled her closer and rested my head on hers. What had my daughter done to my granddaughter...?

It only got worse from there. Nina stopped talking, even to me. She would get in trouble every day after school...the song kept on popping up, and, when she was almost twelve years old, after seven long years of schooling, I could come up with almost a scrapbook that went with the song...it was very sad for me to see my granddaughter fail...it was a reflection of my parenting, and it always had been.

One day, I just began to sing, secretly watching Nina's PE class as I had done almost every day...it may seem creepy, but I just cared so much about her and I wanted to find out what was wrong.

_"Made a wrong turn, once or twice." _In the first grade was when it all began...Nina was sent to the principal for hurting a young boy who had been harassing her because her mother was only twenty-two, and he knew that she was a mistake. That was the day she stopped talking to me.

_"Dug my way out; blood and fire." _Then she began wearing dark makeup, around third grade, and walking to school from her condo three miles away because she didn't want to take the bus. At recess, all she would do was sit in the corner of the far end of the playground, where no one went, and watch as everyone had all the fun they wanted, ignoring the girl who needed them most.

_"Bad decisions; that's alright." _I wasn't mad at her at all. As she got to fourth grade, her mother tried to parent her more than before...I overheard one of their fights as I was sneaking out of the condo in the early morning of one of Nina's worse days. Nina's mother was worried that Nina was turning emo, or goth, or whatever the word was. Nina didn't use the defense that she wasn't, but she didn't want anything to do with her mother and her mother's fashion choices.

_"Welcome to my silly life. Mistreated, misplaced, misunderstood."_ Nina stopped paying attention in classes. She would come out to the playground with scissors on hand and scars on her arms. She had dyed her hair black with permanent dye. She and her mother weren't on speaking terms. She wasn't on speaking terms with anyone.

_"Miss "no way, it's all good". It didn't slow me down." _I saw through her cover of makeup and lies. I knew that she was almost always sporting a black eye or a cut lip, and that underneath her shirt were swollen bruises up her belly and chest from her father's physical abuse.

_"Mistaken, always second guessing." _The guidance counselor approached her one day at recess. It broke my heart to see Nina's cover of lies keep her out of trouble once again. I knew that makeup was covering the scars on her face, arms, and various parts of her body.

_"Underestimated, look, I'm still around." _Then came fifth grade...Nina began to develop sexually at that point. Not very much, but enough for her father to take notice. And enough for me to take notice that her father had taken notice. Every recess, instead of just staring at the other kids on the playground, she would stare blankly at her knees, completely lost. One night, I was going to sneak into the condo when I heard something...her father, telling her to stay quiet and to not tell anyone.

_"Pretty pretty please, don't you ever ever feel, like you're less than fuckin' perfect." _I sang the profanity because I knew that the song didn't mean as much without it. Nina was being sexually abused and possibly raped by her father almost every night, and I guess I was a bad grandmother for not telling anyone. I didn't want to interfere anymore. Nina's failure hurt me. I loved her, but I hated myself for not loving her enough to fix the situation she was in.

_"Pretty pretty please, if you ever ever feel, like you're nothing, you're fuckin' perfect to me." _Rachel began going back to school. She had quit her night job and started night school, taking a daytime job, leaving Nina either at school or alone with her father at all times. That thought scared me. I knew she needed someone to talk to, but I didn't think I was that person. One day, I saw that she had run out of makeup...the teacher whisked her off to the principal's office.

_"You're so mean when you talk about yourself. You are wrong." _I overheard the principal screaming at her from my spot right outside school grounds. I winced as I heard Nina's hoarse voice reply with, "It was an accident. I fell and hurt myself on the corner of my bed last night. No one did this to me!" I knew she was lying.

_"Change the voices in your head. Make them like you instead." _By sixth grade, she was resorting to wearing almost all of her makeup at once, ditching classes to harm herself with a blade, and I swear I caught her smuggling drugs in her backpack. She needed relief from that nightmare, and I was helpless. I should have done something the first time her parents abused her, almost six years ago...

_"So complicated. Look how big you'll make it." _I also noticed that Nina was hardly bringing anything to school. Her backpack was tiny. She wouldn't wear her PE clothes, and she wasn't bringing lunch and her parents sure weren't giving her any money to eat. After all, she was a mistake...

_"Filled with so much hatred... Such a tired game." _I flashed back to my elementary school years. I had looked up ways to relieve stress on the Internet when I was young. One thing had popped up, and it seemed to be the right choice. And that's how my life became exactly how Nina's was.

_"It's enough. I've done all I can think of." _I got out of it, of course, but that was later...I realized that I had no future doing what I was, and...I made myself quit. Nina didn't have that kind of willpower. My beautiful granddaughter, who I had vowed to protect, was...completely different.

_"Chased down all my demons. See you do the same." _I decided to count how many things were wrong with her one day. Her hair was black and straightened. Her eyes were dark purple due to contacts and she wore heavy black eyeliner, mascara, and eyeshadow. Her lips were blood red and her face looked swollen yet flawless. A thin layer of skin colored makeup covered scars up and down both of her arms. Her breasts were swollen from constant abuse. She was so skinny you could count her ribs. She was doing drugs. She was completely gone. Thirteen differences...

_"Pretty pretty please, don't you ever ever feel, like you're less than, fuckin' perfect." _I decided to confront her that day, after school. "Nina..." I whispered from the side of the road as she left the school, stopping singing as soon as I caught sight of her, though the song continued in my head.

_"Pretty pretty please, if you ever ever feel, like you're nothing, you're fuckin' perfect to me." _"Gran. Why the hell are you here?" she demanded. I flinched at her cursing. "I'm sorry..." I whispered, tears falling down my face. She walked over to me.

_"The world stares while I swallow my fear; the only thing I should be drinking is an ice cold beer." _I gently reached out to touch her face, and she almost screamed. "I'm sorry!" I responded, alarmed.

_"So cool in lying and we try, try, try, but we try too hard, it's a waste of my time." _That's when she started crying. Her makeup slowly ran off her face and she buried her face in her hands. I pulled out a tissue and she took it gladly, wiping all the remaining makeup from her face.

_"Done looking for critics, 'cuz they're everywhere. They don't like my jeans, they don't get my hair."_ She looked worse than I expected. Both of her eyes were bruised and there were cuts on her lips and cheeks. At that moment, she completely collapsed. "Nina!" I screamed.

_"Change ourselves, and we do it all the time. Why do we do that?" _A girl with dark brown hair and glasses ran over to us, pulling her cell phone out of her pocket. Within five minutes, an ambulance was at the school, and we were surrounded by at least one hundred middle school-age students. The paramedics shooed them away, and they took my poor Nina away, to the ambulance.

_"Why did I do that? Why did I do that...?" _I held Nina's hand in the ambulance. She was immediately hooked up to several machines, and she was hardly breathing on her own. Her heartbeat was slow and faltering from malnutrition and she was losing blood from where she hit her head on the sidewalk after she collapsed.

_"Ohhhhhh! Pretty pretty please, don't you ever ever feel, like you're less than, fuckin' perfect." _I continued mouthing the words to my poor little Nina. Eventually, the paramedic spoke up and said that she was suffering from anorexia, and that she was traumatized from everything that had happened to her. Seeing me had apparently set it all off.

_"Pretty pretty please, if you ever ever feel, like you're nothing, you're fuckin' perfect to me." _She said that the trauma was probably a result of physical and sexual abuse. I hung my head, ashamed that I hadn't reported it before... I spoke up. "It was her father...I know it was."

_"You're perfect; you're perfect." _The paramedic gave me a startled look. "Well, unless she confirms it..." "She will. As soon as she wakes up." I stroked my poor granddaughter's face. I knew what had to be done.

_"Pretty pretty please, don't you ever ever feel, like you're less than, fuckin' perfect." _And that's how, six months later, Nina was in counseling for drug abuse, her anorexia, and trauma recovery, and her parents were both in jail, her father facing a lifetime sentence and her mother an accomplice. Nina was officially my adopted child. And that was how it should have been.

_"Pretty pretty please, if you ever ever feel, like you're nothing, you are perfect to me." _After three years of counseling, Nina was finally back to normal. She returned home from the care facility she had been staying in, and as soon as she got to my doorstep I embraced her, burying my head in her shoulder. When I looked up, I smiled. Her hair was a mess, but it was blonde and curly again. Her face was tired and her eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep, but her skin wasn't harmed. The scars were a faint white on her arms, and she was a normal weight. "You are perfect," I whispered to her. All I got in return was a faint smile, and the best granddaughter a forty six year old could ask for. And that's all I ever wanted.

**A/N: Well, what do you think? My thoughts are that Nina couldn't handle being in America any longer after suffering all that abuse, so she applied for a scholarship at the school she now attends. And I know that her life couldn't have been that bad without anyone knowing, but I was over dramatizing it to emphasize how it looked from her gran's point of view.**


	2. Chapter 2

A/N: Hey, guys! I decided to add a second part to this story that involves Nina at Anubis House dealing with her past. Enjoy!

Nina's POV

Everything good in my life...it always goes away. The year I spent solving the mystery with Fabian and the rest of Sibuna was the best of my life. For once, I wasn't constantly preoccupied by thoughts of my awful elementary and middle school years. There wasn't one instance where I even thought about self harm or starvation.

Everything changed the next year. Joy returned, a new boy joined, and Fabian didn't seem to like me as much. Or at all. Two weeks after we broke up, I found myself pushing my food around on its plate; thoughts of the ever-so-tempting razor blade that was sitting in the bathroom wouldn't stop haunting me.

Jerome's continuous comments about my and Fabian's break-up were the last thing I needed at that point. I suppose you could call them the straw that broke the camel's back. Either way, as soon as he finally shut up about us, I abandoned my dinner and the rest of the house.

I found myself in my and Amber's room, tears staining my diary as I tried to convince myself that writing would make me feel better. I had never really gone into detail about my past in the diary for fear of someone else reading it, but maybe it was time to come to terms with my life. Maybe that was the only way to stop myself from this state of mind I was spiraling into. And so I began putting pen to paper, forcing myself to write down the most gruesome details of my life...

_I was always the one left out. My mom had me when she was sixteen years old. She was a single mom until she married my stepfather. I was only two years old. I have no memories of what life was like before him, but I think it was better. My earliest memories are very faint, of gran telling me to tell her everything that happened to me. And I wish she had stayed. To this day, I still don't understand why she abandoned me the way she did; why she held her distance. Everything started when I was so young. I never had a good reputation. I was the only girl wearing make-up in the second grade. I wore the make-up because my stepdad would physically abuse me. And my mom joined in the party as soon as she realized that her make-up was mysteriously disappearing. _

_I didn't have any friends between preschool and seventh grade. When my stepdad killed May, I was shunned by the rest of my classmates. Most of them followed me through grade school. I think my appearance was intimidating, too. The sheer amount of make-up I wore was enough to push people away. My skin was pale and my clothing was ripped and worn out, most of it dyed black. Every time I did something that angered my parents, I would get a beating. To hide the abuse, I would do more things that angered them. The cycle went on for years. I was always too afraid to tell someone, especially when things got worse. _

_The worst thing that happened to me was puberty. I started developing into a young woman at the age of ten. To my stepdad, I was just another person to abuse. The only time I remember my mother being remotely nice to me was after she discovered that my stepdad had been abusing me, too. It was while I was hospitalized and she was on trial. The moment she got word of my diagnoses, she demanded to see me. Though she didn't have custody over me at that point, my gran gave her another chance. There wasn't a single word exchanged in the few minutes she was with me. She just held me in her arms and cried. Later, gran told me that my stepdad had been abusing my mom, too. _

_The worst it ever got was in sixth grade. I had been starving myself for months. I refused to eat for weeks at a time. One night, my stepdad came into my room, as he did most of the time. Most of the time, he stopped at forcing me to pleasure him orally. Because I was so thin, my breasts were very small at that time. At the lowest weight I ever hit, I was wearing bras that claimed to increase your cup size by two and I was still made fun of by my classmates. My stepdad became furious at my lack of breasts and made me perform oral sex on him multiple times. And then...he raped me. Hard. The next day, I fell asleep in class and had nightmares about it. I had to lie again and say that everything was all right. _

_Then my gran found me and I was hospitalized because I passed out. I hadn't eaten in weeks at that point. Recovery was so hard. I had never known was normal was like. It took me three years to get to a point where I was acceptable to be released from inpatient treatment. The next year, I started at Creepy Towers, as everyone calls it. And now...Fabian broke up with me, and I've lost my best friend to her attempts to try to get me and Fabian back together. I feel lost and abandoned...and writing everything down didn't help me at all. _

That was it...as I closed my journal, I wiped the tears from my eyes and refused to let any more fall. It was just too much for me to handle. Shakily, I walked to the bathroom and grabbed my razor from its holder. When I returned to my bedroom, my hands were trembling so much that I almost accidentally dropped the razor.

Rolling up my sleeve, I pulled the head off the razor and rolled up the sleeve of my sweater, exposing the pale skin of my inner forearm, where the faded scars from my childhood still remained. I chose a spot that wasn't already scarred, which was hard to do, and swiped the razor sideways across it a few times. It wasn't the most efficient method of self-injury, but it was all I could handle at that point.

Tears began falling again as I dropped the razor blade. I buried my head in my hands and stayed there.

"Hey, Nin-what's wrong?" came a voice from the doorway. I immediately straightened up to see Fabian crossing the room, rushing to my side.

"Oh, it's...it's nothing. Just..." I couldn't finish my lie without breaking into a fresh round of sobs.

"Nina, I know something's wrong. Is it my fault?" I saw his eye catch the razor blade by my feet. "Nina...no. You...you didn't."

Sniffing, I turned my arm outwards towards him. The blood was now running down my arm and staining the sleeve of my sweater bright red.

I could tell that he was too shocked to speak for a few minutes. His arm reached around me and held me comfortingly. Finally, he said, "Do...do you want to tell me anything?"

Initially, I shook my head. As I thought more, though, my therapists had said to find someone who would listen and always be there for you, and tell them about everything. "Actually...yes. It's a long story..." My breathing became unsteady again; I had managed to stop myself from sobbing in the few minutes of silence, but it was all starting to come back. "I...my parents aren't actually dead." I saw Fabian open his mouth to speak, but I cut him off. "Please, let me tell the whole story. Everything will make sense. My gran...she's only forty nine. When she visited us a few days ago, she put up an act so that people wouldn't get suspicious. I was born when my mom was sixteen. She broke up with my real father before I was even born. When I was two, she married someone. He...he ruined my life." And so I went into the full details of everything that had happened to be because of my stepfather. When I finished, Fabian and I just sat in silence for a few minutes. My arm had stopped bleeding, but my sleeve was stained scarlet.

Finally, he found words. "Why...why didn't you tell anyone this before?"

"I don't know. I didn't want to worry you, I guess..."

Fabian wrapped his other arm around my front and pulled my legs over his. I was practically sitting on his lap, something I never thought he would let me do. His thumbs wiped my tears away and he cupped my cheek with his right hand. "Nina...thank you for telling me everything. I just wish you had told me before. I really care about you, and I would be devastated to lose you. Nina, I...I love you."

His words shook me a little bit. I hadn't expected that from him. "You...love me?" He nodded. For the first time since he had broken up with me, I truly smiled. "I...I think I love you, too."

Our lips met for a few tantalizing seconds before Fabian pulled away. He helped me stand up. "How about we go get your arm cleaned up, and eat some dinner?"

I nodded. "Thank you...so much. Please don't leave me again."

"I won't. Promise." His hand slipped into mine and our fingers intertwined; for the first time that term, I felt as though I had found my place.


End file.
